Billionaires, Russian and otherwise

Two fine examples...

After the dissolution of USSR there was a tricky privatisation program, where all the assets previously belonging to the state (or, as the Constitution stated, to the people of the USSR) became someone's personal assets. There were many tricks involved, one of them being - an asset that is worth billions was bought for a couple of millions (measures were taken to ensure that there was only one participant in the auction, etc.). Just my two cents, I lived there at that time :)

BTW, careful with Wikipedia, don't believe everything it says. But ti gives you the basic idea.

Oh, how very naif. They made it MUCH faster than mere doubling. They managed it very simply: because they are thieves not businessmen, albeit thieves who had the sanction of the then-President Yeltsin. They have stolen much of Russia's infrastructure and natural resources. For example, Yeltsin put Mikhail Khodorkovsky's 'bank', Menatep, in charge of the bidding process for the privatisation of Yukos Oil. Guess what, he sold it to himself for ~$300m, a fraction of its conservative valuation of >$7bn.

Anyone who opposed the crooks, such as Vladimir Petukhov in the Yukos affair, was killed. They are bandits who have been fawned upon by our governments since the mid-1990s, given residents' permits. They should be sent back in chains. At least Khodorkovsky's behind bars, but they all should be there.

Read Amy Chua's 'World on Fire' for a forensic analysis about how countries (not just Russia) can be hijacked by one small group of crooks. It is both fascinating and chilling. Also good is 'Darkness at Dawn', by David Satter.

"Windmill" wrote

Try putting that into reverse: try to get each of the

Second link doesn't seem to work ?

Nice work if you can get it.

A stressful time?

I've noticed quite a few small errors in unimportant articles, so presumably the important stuff gets hashed around quite a lot.

I'll plead guilty to that. But the 'doubling' example was just meant to emphasise how unlikely it all was.

I thought that it could only be done through some antisocial behaviour, at the very least.

Doubtless they brought money in large quantities. That seems to be hard for people to resist.

I believe you.

If someone were able to go from ignorance of the concepts to development then full production of mobile phones, say, after having changed everyone's desires, they could certainly be a billionaire in a year.

But surely it would be slower and much more difficult than that?

Works from here, but I'm sure you can figure out how to find it manually...

You can't get it by any "ethical" means. The measures I mentioned included (but were not limited to) extermination of the potential rivals.

Not to me personally, I was lucky not be in wrong places at wrong times, I didn't have wife and kids and my parents were not as old as they are now :) But for many "a stressful time" is a huge understatement, many people (elderly & sick) simply died from hunger and neglect, many young and ambitious people were killed by either competitors or criminals (racket(?)) trying to organise their business, many others, not-so- ambitious and not-so-young, died from alcohol and drugs as they could not adapt to a new (jungle-style) way of life.

Of course it's unlikely. There are about 6 billion people in the world and only about 1000 billionaires, i.e. about 1 in 6 million.

Of course it is. I don't think many billionaires went from ignorance to mobile phone tycoon in less than a year.